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Even legitimate marketers with clean audiences will receive an abuse report at some point. You might see two reports per 50,000 contacts, but it's important to understand abuse reports, and how to protect your reputation, because anyone can be blocked by major ISPs.
In this article, you'll learn common reasons for abuse reports and how we handle them.
When an email is marked as spam or junk mail, an abuse report is created. The report is automatically sent to the recipient's ISP, and a warning is sent to the sender's ESP. If you're sending your email through Mailchimp, our Abuse Desk staff receives the warning message.
Usually, the warning hides the identity of the person who is complaining and includes a copy of the email you sent along with a brief message stating that their customers are complaining about your emails and that action must be taken to address the issue or our server will be blocked.
To protect your sending reputation and our own, we carefully monitor abuse reports so that we can immediately pinpoint any problems as they arise. If we detect a problem, we can re-distribute email delivery to different servers and IP addresses while we investigate the account in question.
If you are investigated for an abuse report, you need to show that you've collected your audience legitimately and that the complaint against you was made in error. If we can't be sure that the complaint was a mistake, we will likely have to shut down your account until you've taken steps to improve your audience.
We recommend that you take the time to be sure your account is in compliance with our Terms of Use, which prohibit purchased and rented lists or opt-out audiences.
Some abuse reports are the result of a subscribed contact marking mail as spam either by mistake or because they don't realize that marking mail as spam actually generates an abuse report.
Here are some common mistakes even legitimate marketers make that may cause recipients to report abuse.
In order to stay compliant with our Terms of Use and avoid abuse reports as much as possible, always get permission to send to the contacts in your audience.
Here are some specific ways to prevent spam complaints.
We hope you found this useful. If you're interested in how all the different abuse report systems work, and what Mailchimp does to stay off denylists (other providers may refer to it as "blacklists"), here are some resources.
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Learn what permission means for your audience, and why it is required when using Mailchimp.
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